Television review: ‘Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County’

Documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi (“Journeys With George,” “Friends of God”) returns Monday to her customary venue, HBO, with “Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County.” There were whole families living in single motel rooms long before this latest dep/recession gripped the nation and the world, and not only here in Southern California. (CBS News looked in on some Salinas, Calif., motel kids last year, with a return visit just this May.) But the setting of Pelosi’s film is particularly trenchant, given the conspicuous overconsumption that has become associated with the locale — the subtitle echoes “The Real Housewives of Orange County” — and the physical proximity of many of these motels to Disneyland, the self-declared Happiest Place on Earth.

The filmmaking is basic. Pelosi knows where to point her camcorder, but she doesn’t reach for much else, and as a result, she sometimes doesn’t get quite as close to the emotional heart of her subject as she might; there are kinds of truth it takes a little art to express. And when she does get fancy, as with the home-movie video effects she uses to bridge scenes, the effect is corny, inelegant, weirdly amateurish.

Yet, whatever its technical limitations, it’s a film worth the making and the watching. If Pelosi’s primary talent as a filmmaker is her ability to gain trust and access, that’s no small thing, and she does capture the sad ingenuity this life requires — making a stairwell into a jungle gym, a toy store from a dumpster. And she made “Homeless” when, building on past successes, she might easily have looked toward a more glittering or sexy subject. Instead, she turned her attention to a world and a population that, almost by definition, is beneath notice.

Pelosi is not shy about being present in her films, and even as a voice from behind the camera, she can be intrusive, even demanding. It makes sense that, when dealing with kids, one might have to ask a question or two to get the response you need, or even the lack of response you need.

But it’s less usual to tell them to kiss their mother as she goes off to work, or that it’s time to go home now. Her subjects don’t need all that much help to move us, and the best, or at least the most poetic, moments are those when the director seems the least necessary, as she watches a couple of kids watch the Disneyland fireworks from the roof of a parking garage, or a little girl tap dancing in a passageway.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com